Adept Play
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…
Here’s the Darkurthe Legends session from Lincon! Featuring several rather willing & able players, whom I hope to meet with again because they embraced many setting and characterization features, including asking questions, and they were genuinely interested in the formal but savage combat rules. There is one tragedy, which is that the final events of…
The first video is long as I wanted to keep my reply to Mark in a single packet. His question was a comment in the previous Q&A post, regarding my recommendations for myth inquiries & ideas regarding popular culture. I’ve attached an outline which may make it easier to follow. I did not manage actually…
Claudio is working on Inquest, his notion of actually playing an invesigation and maybe, even investigating. A lot of people reading this have sweated over the fundamental contradiction: that the fictional “mystery” is no mystery at all to its author, and therefore how may role-players experience a mystery. So I’m hoping for some real discussion…
Where I played Darkurthe Legends and Spione (slated for upcoming Actual Play posts), and encountered lots of contact among people I knew and others that I didn’t. My schedule for the rest of the year is looking pretty full! I also presented a workshop, perhaps playfully titled “Our role-playing, ourselves.” Although it borrows from a…
I did not title this post “When in Rome.” Please credit this on my karmic record. Near the end of 2022, I received an invitation from Marco Mengoli to visit and teach at the Instituto di Itruzione Superiore “Roselli,” in Aprilia, a suburb of Rome. Several faculty at this school including Marco study and teach…
I scheduled a Circle of Hands session last month at Gothcon, deliberately choosing a monster time-slot at five hours. Four people arrived to play, the maximum I’d permitted, many of whom I did not know. Special mention goes to the exception, Johan, who actually played in the first serious revision of Gray Magick back in…
[This post is adapted from a Patreon post a couple of months ago. It’s relevant to the March Q&A so I’ve made it public here.] I’ve been thinking about a practical aspect of preparation which feeds into qualities of play. It boils down to a simple question: does whoever’s making up important aspects of the…
I scheduled a session of Khaotic at Gothcon, but I didn’t expect a full sign-up + one. Fortunately I’d brought six characters. Having played it before with five was a handful, and six was wild: the more the merrier, as far as this particular fiction is involved, but it’s no joke maintaining the separate perceptions…